Huma Abedin's Muslim Minority Affairs: Not Just a Journal

“Assimilation is a crime against humanity.” So said Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Islamic supremacist who is both prime minister of Turkey and a close chum of President Obama.

The assertion ought to be infamous. But this is, after all, Islam we are talking about -- meaning, we are not talking about it.

You won’t read it in the American media, nor will you hear it from our bipartisan Beltway profiles in courage. Both the Obama Left and the Republican establishment are deeply invested in the fantasy that Erdogan, like Islam itself, is our moderate ally -- ironic, given that Erdogan himself is profoundly offended at the very suggestion that there is such a thing as “moderate Islam.” Yup, what you have been told is the plinth on which American Middle East policy rests, is, according to Erdogan, not only a house-of-cards but:

... an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam, and that’s it.

The prime minister is an excitable sort. Waxing metaphoric about his aggressive, ascendant ideology, he has also observed:

The mosques are our barracks, the minarets our bayonets, the cupolas our helmets, and the faithful our soldiers.

But he is inspired to new heights of fury by the admonition that Muslims living in Europe and North America should assimilate into Western societies. He first called that suggestion a “crime against humanity” in 2008, speaking to a throng of Turkish immigrants in Cologne. It was the obligation of Muslims, he elaborated, to cling to the tenets and culture of Islam. Yes, Muslims in places like Germany must integrate, in the sense of becoming politically active, of pressuring Western societies to give Islam a wide berth. But Muslims should never assimilate -- they should use that wide berth to establish Islam’s authority.

Two years later, given an opportunity to recant during a joint press conference with Chancellor Angela Merkel, Erdogan doubled down:

Assimilation ... [is] the permutation of the values of humans. ... [It puts] pressure on individuals to leave aside their customs and traditions, and such a behavior happens to be a crime against humanity.

The message could not have been clearer: Muslims are in the West to change the West, not to be changed by it.

These sentiments of one of the world’s most influential Islamic leaders -- one about whom Obama has said: “We find ourselves in frequent agreement upon a wide range of issues” -- came to mind this week when Walid Shoebat dropped a new bombshell in the controversy over Huma Abedin’s ties to Islamic supremacism.